Shinhan Financial to Train 40 Young AI Finance Talents

*Editor's Note: 'AI PRISM' (Personalized Report & Insight Summarizing Media) is an 'AI-based customized news recommendation and summary service' developed with support from the Korea Press Foundation. It selects and provides six customized news items by reader type.

1. Shinhan Financial to Provide AI Finance Education to 40 Unemployed Young People

Key Summary: Shinhan Financial Group is recruiting trainees for 'Shinhan Career Next' as part of the 'K-New Deal Academy' run by the Ministry of Employment and Labor and the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, through the 4th of next month. The program targets unemployed young people aged 15 to 34, and runs for three months with job training in financial engineering and AI transformation as well as hands-on field OJT. Full tuition and a monthly training allowance of 600,000 won are provided, with an additional congratulatory payment of 100,000 won for obtaining digital and financial certifications. As an opportunity to build employment-linked AI finance capabilities for free, it is cited as an effective pathway for young people seeking to enter the financial IT field.

2. KB Financial and Google Introduce AI Work Assistant and Consultant

Key Summary: KB Financial has developed the data analysis AI agent 'KB Davis' based on Google Cloud's generative AI 'Gemini.' When employees ask questions in everyday language, the system integrates and searches regulations, product information, and market data to present results, and it is set to develop into a personalized AI work assistant. In the customer consultation area, the multimodal AI agent 'KB Star Byeoli,' which processes voice, text, and images together, is being applied sequentially. Analysts interpret that new employees joining the financial sector now find themselves in an environment where the ability to collaborate with AI tools is emerging as a core practical skill.

3. KT and Amorepacific Cut 12-Day Task to 5 Minutes

Key Summary: KT has completed the 'Data Highway' project, which integrates and redesigns Amorepacific's more than 70 years of R&D data, and built the AI assistant 'Lemon.' Research material and regulatory review work in the product planning stage, which previously took 12 days, has been cut to about 5 minutes, and raw material research history review has also been reduced from 6 days to about 5 minutes. Researchers are assessed to be able to break free from repetitive information searching and focus on creative research such as hypothesis formulation and technological innovation. If similar models spread to various industries such as manufacturing, distribution, and services, considerable changes are expected in the basic work roles of new employees.

4. Long-Term Unemployed Youth Surge 13.5% in Two Years

Key Summary: In the first half of this year, long-term unemployed people among "resting" youth (aged 20 to 39) — those who had no job for at least the past year or had never held a job — numbered 427,143, a 13.5% surge from two years ago. More than 6 out of 10 "resting" youth are long-term unemployed, and their share of the total also rose from 56.6% in 2024 to 62.4% this year. In contrast, youth with work experience within the past year have higher rates of re-employment or return, indicating "negative duration dependence," whereby the longer the employment gap, the more difficult re-entry into the labor market becomes, according to analysis. The government plans to announce a plan early in the third quarter to create more than 200,000 youth jobs by 2030, centered on advanced industries such as semiconductors and AI.

5. Hoban Construction Automatically Calculates Ready-Mixed Concrete Volume With AI

Key Summary: Hoban Construction has developed AI-based 'automatic ready-mixed concrete volume calculation technology' and, after verification at pilot sites, will expand its application to all sites starting next month. Under the system, AI analyzes drawings and then site technicians only need to mark the pouring sections for volumes to be calculated in real time, and it is expected to significantly improve accuracy and efficiency compared to existing manual work. Earlier, the company also accumulated cases where the introduction of automatic window and door quantity estimation technology reduced estimation and ordering work that took more than three days to half a day. As AI adoption is rapidly replacing simple repetitive work even at construction sites, observers say the standards of capabilities required of new technicians are also changing.

6. Fastest Aging Pace in OECD... Working-Age Population Plummets

Key Summary: Last year, Korea's working-age population (aged 15 to 64) decreased by 393,000, meaning a population equivalent to that of Busan's entire Haeundae-gu district disappeared in a single year. It took Korea 7 years for the share of the population aged 65 and older to rise from 14% to 20%, an overwhelmingly faster pace than Japan (12 years), Italy (20 years), and Germany (36 years). The KDI forecast that due to the decline in the working-age population, the contribution of labor input to growth will turn negative around 2030, and the potential growth rate will fall to the low 1% range in 2030. Analysts interpret that the generation of new office workers entering the labor market will build their careers in an environment where productivity improvement through the use of AI and robots is structurally required.